How to Recover Permanently Deleted Emails from Gmail

July 1, 2016

You can recover deleted emails from your Gmail account. Google provides a facility that may help you in getting your missing email messages back. Learn how to go about it.

Yesterday, a friend of ours came with a question, “I deleted a few emails from my Gmail inbox about a couple of month ago. But now I realize that those emails were important and I am unable to find them in the Trash folder. Is it possible to recover deleted emails from Gmail?”

A similar question was asked by a TechWelkin reader a few months ago. He had deleted emails from Gmail Inbox and then also emptied the Trash folder —thereby deleting all the trash content permanently. A number of people face this scenario. Also sometimes, it appears that, the emails simply go missing as the Gmail user does not intentionally delete them. You may feel at loss as to where your emails have gone. And of course the first thing that comes to your mind is that your Gmail account has been hacked! If you do not follow strict security advice, email accounts may get compromised, but if only some of your emails are missing, there is something you can do recover them. You can recover deleted emails from Gmail.

Recover Deleted Emails from Gmail

It appears that Google keeps trashed emails for some more time even after the Trash is cleared. Therefore, you can contact Google Mail support and request them to help you find missing emails. Google has provided an online form to receive such requests. Follow the steps given below:

You will get a small form to submit. As you have already logged into your Gmail account, the form will automatically recognize that you want to recover deleted emails from that particular account.

Mention the date when you first noticed that your emails have gone missing.

Provide a brief description of the problem and steps to reproduce the problem. Here you just need to briefly explain what happened. For example, you deleted emails from inbox or your deleted the emails from Trash as well or you did not intentionally delete emails but somehow they have disappeared.

Click Submit button

Soon (mostly within half an hour) you will get an email from mail-support@google.com. The email will tell you whether Google was able to recover your emails or not. Please note that you should not reply to this email as it comes from an automated system. A reply will not be read by anyone.

If Google is able to retrieve your emails, you will get an affirmative reply and the said emails will begin to show in your account. Check both the Inbox and Trash folders.

Can You Recover Permanently Deleted Emails?

It is not very clear how Google recovers and returns deleted emails to you. Different people have reported different things. Last month, immediately after submitting the request form, a friend got all the emails that she had deleted in last one year. A similar effort made by another friend bore no fruit and Google sent an unable to recover sort of reply.

We believe that Google can return emails to you if you had not manually emptied the Trash folder. Emails older than 30 days get automatically deleted from the Gmail Trash folder. We think that Google can return these emails to you. But if you have manually emptied the Trash, you may get a negative reply. However, there is no harm in trying by sending a recovery request using the above mentioned form.

Your Experience?

Please let us know your experience with using this deleted emails recovery tool of Google. Your comment will help other readers who are distressed because of losing their important emails.

We hope that this article was useful for you. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions in this regard. We will try our best to help you. Thank you for using TechWelkin!

Lalit Kumar is the Principal Author and Founder of TechWelkin. He is a web explorer and he enjoys finding useful information on the Internet. He loves to put things together to create a bigger solution. Lalit is passionate about technology, languages and literature. You can contact Lalit via email (techwelkin [at] gmail [dot] com) or Facebook (facebook.com/techwelkin).

Recently my emails were accidentally deleted from my Gmail account, and I followed few steps to recover the emails. The steps are:

First, need to go to Trash Folder of your Gmail account from where we can retrieve the deleted emails and second step would be to search for the emails there in search box with typing that particular keyword of the email. If the email you are looking is there, then you need to select the email and move the email from the trash to Inbox folder. If you wish to recover multiple emails or folders from the trash, then you need to select the emails and move the emails to the folder you want to save the emails

Thanks for the great helpful article for recovering the deleted mails from trash. I was also worried about the deleted mail and how to get it back. Once I read your article, I applied the steps specified by you. I got mails back in my Gmail inbox.

Lalit you are a genius! Thank you so much, I’ve spent many hours trying to find a solution to my problem – I’d lost over 5000 emails. There were a few forums which suggested a number of difficult ways to retrieve my missing files, but they simply didn’t work. I was just about to give up – then I found your article – and it worked. I contacted Google Support whom responded with a prompt email informing me they could help, within 10 minutes my lost files started streaming in. Such a relief!

I made a ridiculous mistake whilst having a clear out. I deleted all my sent items, not considering that it would delete the entire conversations from each label. I immediately emptied my trash.

Followed the above and wrote a short novel to explain what I had done, instantly had a link to change password. Then I resubmitted, without writing full novel from scratch- I just said I was resubmitting, and then… voila! All my emails back where they should be in an instant.

Didn’t work. Received message back within 10 seconds saying that due to them being permanently deleted they can never be retrieved. Same message as from Kofi. I did deleted them but by accident. Maybe you should update your information.

you are wonderful.. i tried this but unfortunately i could not get my mails and I got a reply Hello,

We received your request to recover deleted emails from your account. Unfortunately, the emails were permanently deleted, so we’re not able to get them back for you.

We know this can be really frustrating, and we’re sorry that we can’t help this time around. To help prevent this from happening again, it’s a good idea to double check the security of your account. We’ve put together some tools and tips in our “Security Checklist” article that you can read through in about 10 minutes to make sure the only one who has access to your Gmail is you.

If you’d like to better understand how deletion works in Gmail, or how long email stays in Trash before it’s deleted (about a month), please read through our “Deleted Messages” article.